Making the mobile phone a new platform for search marketing

Ads-Click, a provider of web search and contextual advertising programs, this week launched Ads-Click Mobile for managing online ads across mobile phones as well as traditional web sites. The company is out to challenge Google’s new AdSense for Mobile.

Ads-Click S.A., a provider of Internet search and contextual advertising, this week launched Ads-Click Mobile for managing online ads across mobile phones as well as traditional web sites. Europe-based Ads-Click is out to challenge Google Inc., which in September announced its contextual search ad program AdSense for Mobile, which is an advertising program for site publishers who want to host mobile ads, and Mobile Ads, a program for advertisers.

John Burke, vice president of business development for Ads-Click, says the new Ads-Click Mobile application lets marketers as well as site publishers manage contextual ad programs for mobile phones, traditional web sites and RSS feeds from a single interface. Contextual ad programs are designed so that Internet search ads appear next to related content on participating web sites.

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Ads-Click, though new to the U.S. market, has about 3,000 web site publishers and a few hundred advertisers, including eBay Inc., participating in its traditional web site contextual ad program, and it expects many of them to also join the Ads-Click Mobile program, Burke says. “Our expectation is to get a lot of publishers and advertisers to use both traditional web site and mobile advertising,” he says.

Ads-Click differentiates itself from Google by offering more control over ad placement and more transparency in its fee structure, Burke says. Ads-Click’s fee structure is based on a flat revenue-sharing model, with publishers setting their own advertising rates and keeping 83% of ad revenue.

Ads-Click is serving up about a half-billion online ads or more per month, Burke says. Although Ads-Click hosts its ad programs for most of its participating publishers, it also offers white-label licensed software versions of its programs that publishers can host on their own network servers.

Ads-Click, which was founded in 2003 in Geneva, received $4 million in venture capital late last year from Munich, Germany-based Bay Tech Venture Capital.

Ads-Click has a long way to go, however, to pose a major challenge to Google, says Mary Beth Kemp, a Paris-based search marketing analyst for Jupiter Research. “At the end of the day it’s all about who has more eyeballs. Ads-Click may be a good niche player, but I don’t see Google losing market share to them.”